ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 07.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> PAUL: Hello, Dr. Just. I guess I'm the only one who has not yet introduced myself. My name is Paul, and I'm a former computer systems analyst now serving as a pastor to a small group of people, many of them Haitian immigrants, here in Miami. I'm pleased to be in this course because like David and my other colleagues, I find worship challenging to design. Since we�re talking about worship during Jesus' lifetime, what is the significance of the three places of worship that Jesus participated in during his ministry, the synagogue, the temple, and the house? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, Paul. It's great to me you, and I look forward to some of your other questions. This is an excellent one, and we've already talked a little bit about these places, but this is a good time for us to kind of stand back and look at them and their specific character as places of worship. First and foremost, you start with the temple. And I've already talked about the temple as being the place of the holy of holies, the place where God dwells. But I think we also need to talk a little bit about what was going on there in terms of its liturgical life, and who was in charge of that life. When you kind of enter into the New Testament and into its world, you discover that it is a world that is rich in places and people. And at the time of Our Lord, there was a number of different parts of the religious establishment of Israel that had a great deal of impact on its liturgical life. I think you're probably aware, from the Old Testament, that it was the tribe of Levi that was in charge of the temple. They were the priestly tribe so they were the ones who were the priests offering the sacrifices, first in the tabernacle and then later on in the temple when it located itself in Jerusalem at the time of David and Solomon. That temple at the time of Our Lord was the second temple built up after its destruction earlier on in Israel's history, built by Herod. It's one of the most magnificent structures in the world, even today. It was so vital to the life of Israel that everything was measured in Israel in connection with the temple. We believe, for example, that Jesus probably traveled to Jerusalem at least three times in his ministry. We know, certainly, the first and third years of his ministry, but probably every year for Passover to come to the temple. And even though we don't know this necessarily from the Scripture, we know that he was in the temple at forty days old, at twelve years old. Chances are, he went to the temple almost every year of his life for Passover. His final teachings are in the temple. So the temple is very important to Our Lord. The temple is so different from what we experience today in our worship. It was an extraordinarily earthy place. It was a place where there was great deals of people, and in some ways, it was chaotic. There was a lot of coming and going. There was tremendous amounts of sacrificial activity that brought with it smells and sounds and, really, a very rich and earthy life. I think in some ways, we would be quite surprised at the temple because it almost, at times, was like a slaughterhouse, rich in its aroma. And it was huge, the temple court at least, and various courts within the court, places for only gentiles to come, places for only women to come, and then where the priests come, and then, of course, in the holy of holies, the high priest once a year. So there were different boundaries in the temple. Within the religious establishment of Israel, the chief priests came from the Sadducees, which was a party. Interestingly, they were what we might today think of as kind of the theological liberals. They didn't believe in the resurrection. They only believed in the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, what we call The Pentateuch. And they were so focused on the temple that they, in many ways, had very little to do with the life of Jesus. They were the leaders on the Sanhedrin, which was the council that kind of overlooked the entire religious life of Israel. They were the ones who essentially set the tone for the sacrificial system in the temple. Just to illustrate a little bit about the character of the temple, and this will give you a sense of what the temple life was like. During the time of Passover, which is always during spring, during our Easter time, there would be literally tens of thousands of pilgrims who would come into this city. One of the estimates is that the city would get as high as having one hundred thousand visitors. Now, a Passover meal was a family meal, say, about ten people per family. So in order for each family to have a lamb that was sacrificed and used at their Passover meal, in the temple yard there, during the time when Passover was coming about, they needed to bring in ten thousand lambs, slaughter those lambs, and pour the blood on the altar there that was in the holy place. Now, we know that what the priests did was they had a bucket brigade where they would simply take the blood from these sacrificed lambs, one after another after another, and they would pass those buckets along until those buckets would be dumped on the altar in the holy place. And in the process, that blood was spilled and they'd sometimes have to come into what we'll see in one of our graphics is called the court of the women with these steps and hose down the steps. And there were these big, you know, drains for all this water and blood to go in. In fact, we know from one of the first century writers that some of the little boys would go over by the river Kidron, which was the river that ran between the temple and the Mount of Olives, right next to the temple, and during Passover, they would sit there and take bets as to what time that river would turn pink from all the blood that went into the water system underneath the temple. That gives you just a little bit of an idea of the character of the temple as a sacrificial place. And our Lord was very much a part of this. He submitted himself to this temple and to its life. The second place of worship is the synagogue, which is totally different from the temple because there is no sacrifice in the synagogue. What we'll see when we look at the synagogue liturgy, is that it is a liturgy of word, prayer, and song. And in this way, it has a link to the temple because one of the things I didn't say about the temple liturgy is that it was a time of word, prayer, and song. Of course, both in temple and synagogue, the main song of the Jews were the psalms. The word of God that was read in the temple was echoed in the synagogue, and there was this link between Temple and synagogue by means of the word of God. But when we see the temple liturgy and compare it to the synagogue liturgy we see that the synagogue liturgy is a liturgy of the mind, not of the senses. The temple is much more sensual with all the smells and sounds of animals and all the different activities going on. Whereas, the synagogue liturgy is much more like the liturgy that we know today in our services. Synagogues tended to be outside of Jerusalem. There were synagogues at the time of Our Lord in Jerusalem, but they were generally outside of Jerusalem because it was a way for the people outside of Jerusalem to stay in touch with what was going on in the temple because they couldn't get to Jerusalem. And the religious leaders of the synagogue where the Pharisees. This was a different group than the Sadducees because they weren�t priests. They were kind of, what we might call, full-time church workers. But they were teachers of the law. There were rabbis. They were biblical scholars, and they were, and I think we can use this language, they were the conservatives within the religious establishment of Israel. They were the Conservatives on the Sanhedrin because they believed in the resurrection. They believed in the prophecies of the Messiah. They believed the Messiah was going to come, suffer, and die. They believed in the whole canon, including the prophets which, as I said before, the Sadducees did not believe in. The Pharisees were the ones that Jesus had the most contact with. In fact, as you read the Gospels, you'll find that there's really very little mention of the Sadducees. And the Pharisees are always there with Jesus. The fact of the matter is, if you were to look at Jesus at the time of the first century and you were to ask which religious party does he belong to, you would not even hesitate saying that he teaches like a Pharisee. He dresses like a Pharisee. He really, in many ways, is just like a Pharisee except for one difference, and that difference made all the difference in the world. It was the way they interpreted the Old Testament that set them apart from the Jesus. The Pharisees were the way of the law. And we're going to see that even though they believed in the written code of the law, which is the scriptures, they had their own oral code that saw the law as being the way of salvation. Whereas, Jesus comes and essentially turns the people of Israel to see that the written code of the law is the most important way in which one reads the scriptures. And he is very critical of some of the oral traditions of the Pharisees. If the Pharisees taught the way of the law, Jesus teaches the way of the gospels because Jesus interprets the Old Testament in terms of himself. It's what we might call a messianic interpretation. And we're going to see that when Jesus goes to the synagogues, Sabbath after Sabbath, which is the rhythm of his ministry, he will go as a teacher of the law invited by the Pharisees to now show them that the Old Testament is all about him. The primary place where Jesus worships is the synagogue. But there is a third place and one that he frequents as much as the synagogue, even though it is not a public place. It is a private place of worship, and that is in the home, or what we might call house worship. I mentioned before that the Passover Seder was a family meal. That was once a year. But every Friday night for us, which would be for the Jews the beginning of Saturday, and the reason we say that is that the Sabbath began for the Jews at sundown on Friday night. So every Friday night, the beginning of their Sabbath, they would have a meal. And that meal is what we would call a House Seder. That is, an order of service that would be in the context of their home that had a liturgical rhythm and structure to it. And, in fact, it was a mini Passover so that every Sabbath they would remember the Passover, which was their way of every Sabbath remembering the lamb who was slain and would be raised again. In other words, it was a way of them celebrating the blood of the lamb that was going to set them free. This is very similar to what we perhaps saw many years ago in the Roman Catholic Church where on Fridays, they would refrain from eating meat and oftentimes would eat fish instead. Now, why did they do that? Because Friday was the day on which Our Lord was crucified. And in honor of that, in reference to that, they would refrain from eating meat so that they could remember that this is the day the Lord died for them. We don't know for sure whether or not the Roman Catholics got that from the Jews, but there certainly is a parallel between the House Seder on the Sabbath that was a remembrance of the Passover blood and the fact that on Fridays, in the Roman Catholic Church, they would not eat meat as a remembrance of the fact that this was the day that Jesus died. Now, here again, in summary are the three places of worship: Temple, where God was present in the holy of holies and in the sacrificial rites where, by word and prayer and song, through the sacrifices offered to God, God was called forth in their remembrance as a God who is coming to save. And then in the synagogues, which were outside of Jerusalem, where they would hear the word of God and they would pray and they would sing. And then every week in their homes, they would have a family meal that was a small glimpse of the eternal feast that they would have with God that they would also have once a year in the Passover Seder. Temple, synagogue, and house, those are the foundational structures of worship for the Jews when we talk about the places of worship in the Old Testament.